Experiment tests whether bobolink payment plan will fly

Researchers ask whether Champlain Valley residents are willing to pledge money to help the survival of grassland birds

Apr. 13, 2013

Researchers band bobolinks in a Hinesburg hayfield in 2007 as part of a long-term study of the bird's biology and survival chances. A new research project in 2013 seeks to determine whether private funds can be raised to pay farmers to change their haying practices to prevent the death of nestings. / GLENN RUSSELL/Free Press file

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Free Press Staff Writer

Male bobolinks trill a bubbling song in mating season. The birds are a less and less common sight in the fields and pastures of the Champlain Valley. / Courtesy photo

How to ‘buy’ a bobolink

• WHAT: The Bobolink Project, a combination of academic research and conservation effort. • WHO: Researchers are ornithologist Allan Strong of the University of Vermont and environmental economist Stephen Swallow of the University of Connection. • HOW TO PARTICIPATE: Go to www.bobolinkproject.com. • HOW IT WORKS: Participants pledge to pay a certain amount per field to delay hay-cutting and protect bobolinks. People can vary the amount they pledge depending on how many fields are involved. Money will go to farmers who charge the least for changing their field practices. If insufficient money is raised, those who pledge will not be billed. If excess money is raised, each pledge will be pro-rated to reduce the amount participants pay. • DEADLINE: Pledges must by made by April 29. • MOREINFORMATION: A full explanation is available at www.bobolinkproject.com.

Meet two songbirds

BOBOLINK:

Latin name: Dolichonyx oryzivorus. Description: 6- to 8-inch songbird of open grasslands. Habitat: Prefers large hay fields. Plumage: Males during mating season: black front, white back, yellow cap on head. Females: Variegated brown and straw- to sunny-yellow. Song: Jumbled, piercing series of sounds uttered in flight. Noted for: Annual 12,000-mile roundtrip migration from northern United States and Canada to southern Brazil and Argentina. Conservation status: In decline over much of its range. Vermont status: declining at rate of 3 percent a year. Cause: loss of hay fields to development or reforestation; intensive haying. SAVANNAH SPARROW:

Latin name: Passerculus sandwichensis Description: Four- to 6-inch songbird of open grasslands Habitat: Prefers large hayfields Plumage: Brown or grayish-brown overall; streaking on back, breast and flanks; yellowish eyebrow stripe Song: Several short chip-chips followed by two or more high, thin, long buzzes Noted for: Females who lay up to six clutches of eggs in an attempt to replace eggs lost to haying or predators Conservation status: Thriving over much of its range. Vermont status: Strong and Perlut found a less than 1 percent annual decrease in fields studied Source: Allan Strong; Cornell University Ornithology Lab.

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Bobolinks, yellow-capped monarchs of the meadow, will begin returning to the hayfields of the Champlain Valley three weeks from now.

Each songbird will have survived a 12,000-mile round-trip journey.

“They have flown across the Caribbean and the Amazon,” said conservation biologist Roz Renfrew of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies. “They have endured unbearable heat, been treated as pests in farm fields in South America. They escaped trapping for the pet trade in the Caribbean and may have survived hurricanes.”

The little grassland bird and its co-inhabitant the savannah sparrow face new disasters as they build their nests in the long grass of farmers’ hayfields in Vermont.

A bobolink that nests in a field that is cut twice or three times a summer faces zero chance of raising any young. Small wonder that surveys for the Vermont Breeding Bird Atlas found that bobolink numbers had plummeted 75 percent from 1966-2007.

During more than a decade of research, Renfrew and scientists at the University of Vermont have made fields in Shelburne, Hinesburg and neighboring towns an epicenter of research into the mysteries of the grassland singers.

In findings new to science, they have tracked bobolink migration — one bird with a tailwind covered 1,100 miles in 24 hours. They have discovered that the birds, unlike other songbirds, return to nesting grounds near where they were born, and that bobolinks survive their first migration at much higher rates than previously thought.

Now, two researchers are probing an even more difficult question: How much value do Champlain Valley residents place on fields full of soaring, singing birds? Are they willing to buy time for bobolinks by paying farmers to delay some cutting until bobolinks fledge their young?

“If we have these environmental values, we can’t keep waiting for government to do it or the big rich guy down the road to do it,” said Stephen Swallow, an environmental economist at the University of Connecticut and a leader of The Bobolink Project, which is organizing the project.

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“This research is challenging people to ask: ‘Am I willing to take action? And if not, maybe my values aren’t what I thought,’” he said.

Bobolink economics

Farmers, dairy farmers in particular, need to cut their hay several times a summer, when its protein content is highest. That typically means a harvest in late May or early June, another in July and a third in late summer.

Bobolinks need 65 days to mate, lay eggs in the grass and raise their hatchlings until they can fly away. The farmers’ cut-after-cut schedule conflicts with the birds’ routine.

But research led by University of Vermont ornithologist Allan Strong and former graduate student (now University of New England professor) Noah Perlut found that bobolinks will mate again if their May nest is destroyed. If a farmer delays the next cut 65 days, bobolinks will make the most of that second chance and successfully raise a new set of nestlings.

Trouble is, delaying that second cut reduces the value of the hay and might make a third hay harvest impossible. Most farmers can’t afford to take the loss.

“It all comes down to finances,” said Phil Wagner of Bridport, a beef farmer who has expressed interest in The Bobolink Project. He sells thousands of bales of hay each year — income his farm needs.

Based on the Strong and Perlut research, the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service for several years offered New England farmers $135 an acre to delay their second cut. The offer was particularly appealing to those who raise hay for horses, which don’t require as high-quality hay. For a short time, more than 1,000 acres of Vermont hay land was enrolled in the federal program.

Then the government dropped its price to $86 per acre — and found no takers in the farm community.

Enter UVM professor Swallow. If government can’t do the job, he wondered, would private citizens be willing to “buy” this environmental good?

With a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he and Strong set out to find the answer.

Swallow distinguishes his experiment from traditional ways of raising money for environmental causes. Usually a donor gives money — say, for bird conservation generally — and moves on. The donor doesn’t know exactly how his or her gift has been spent.

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In this three-year project, Swallow wants people to understand they are purchasing a specific good: the continued presence of bobolinks in specific fields.

In essence, The Bobolink Project is asking people to share the cost of renting farmers’ fields for 65 days in June and July.

Participants are asked how much they would be willing to pay, per field, if Swallow raises enough money to contract for one 10-acre field. What if he receives enough pledges to contract for haying changes on three fields? How much would the donor pledge for each of those fields? Five fields? Ten?

Once all the pledges are made — the deadline is April 29 — Swallow and Strong, his co-investigator, will add up the money that has been promised.

If little is raised, no habitat will be protected, and those who pledged won’t be billed. If the pledges produce more money than the project needs to pay interested farmers, each pledge will be reduced by a prorated amount.

“We are saying (to donors), ‘If you are paying for bobolink habitat, we are going to deliver that. If we can’t, we won’t take your money,’” Swallow said. The idea is to create something like a market for the environmental services that farm fields provide.

Assuming enough pledges are received, the researchers will negotiate with farmers who have expressed interest in the program. The farmers who offer to change their practices on good bobolink habitat for the least amount of money will be the first to be accepted. The project will fund increasingly higher bids from other farmers until the money runs out. Then every farmer will be paid the same amount per acre as the highest accepted bid.

'That got my attention'

The Bobolink Project carried out its first research in Jamestown, R.I., where residents pledged enough to protect habitat during nesting seasons on two farms.

Strong and Swallow hope this year’s experiment in Vermont will scale up to five or 10 farms. They are marketing their idea in meetings with farmers and to potential contributors with television appearances, radio blurbs and direct-mail appeals.

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Wagner, the Bridport farmer, said he heard the figure of $550 an acre at the meeting he attended.

“That got my attention,” he said, because the figure would help him pay for the hayland he rents.

But Swallow said Wagner might have misunderstood. Although The Bobolink Project paid amounts like that to farmers in Rhode Island, where farms are small and under intense development pressure, he expects farmers in Vermont to ask for considerably lower amounts.

In Orwell, landowner Elizabeth Frank said she is looking for a number of new sources of income to hold onto her 54 acres. She is raising fruits and vegetables, selling some hay and offering permaculture workshops.

She is enthusiastic about The Bobolink Project.

“I am so grateful they are making possible, for people who want to do the right thing, to provide for species in decline,” she said.

She has not discussed with researchers what payment she would need to delay haying on her 12-acre field. But if the price is right, she said, she would like to skip her first cut and not harvest the field until nesting season is over.

On the other side of the ledger — those who have pledged to help pay farmers — are people including Judy Brook of South Burlington. Brook works as the coordinator of tour guides at Shelburne Farms, where Strong and Perlut have carried out much of their bobolink research.

“Bobolinks have been pushed out of the West; now they are being hayed out of grasslands here,” Brook said. “They are beautiful; they sing this bubbling song that comes from their depths. Why not protect them?”

For “anyone who has met a bobolink,” a simple explanation of the project should be sufficient to inspire pledges, she said.

If you haven't met a bobolink ...

Brook put her finger on one of the challenges facing the conservation aspect of The Bobolink Project.

The songbird is not one that commonly visits backyard bird feeders. To see a bobolink you need to travel country lanes or visit a big hayfield in the early morning.

Will people buy protection for a bird they have never met?

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“It’s usually when you meet something and learn about it that you come to value and then are called to action,” Brook said.

Swallow acknowledged that if conservation were the only goal of the project, offering those who pledge an incentive — perhaps a morning in the field observing bobolinks — might increase participation.

But this is academic research carried into the real world. Swallow’s goal is to test participants’ willingness to pay for something for which they receive no tangible personal benefit. It’s easy for people to tell a survey researcher that they would pay more to keep farm fields open, undeveloped and full of birds. This project asks people to put money behind their convictions.

The researcher said he has had potential contributors who have said, I think your bobolink work is important, but there are orphanages, there are people who can’t feed their families, and my money would be better spent on those causes.

“As an economist, I don’t mind if people say orphanages are more important than bobolinks; that’s OK,” Swallow said. “Economics is just about the real world; it’s not idyllic. If there are other priorities of higher importance than habitat for grassland birds, we’ll find that out.”

Candace Page, who has covered bobolink research for seven years, made a pledge to The Bobolink Project after reporting and writing this story. Contact her at 864-1755 or pagecandace@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/CandacePage.